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Petrograd connection, planning and statecraft - Saving nations from financial raiders
Petrograd connection, planning and statecraft
Saving nations from financial raiders
Wendell W Solomons
In brief
Piracy once roamed the seas. That was the status quo. History says that queen Elizabeth I authorised naval commanders, including Sir Walter Raleigh, to plunder merchant schooners. Over time, piracy at sea seriously interfered with the trade of merchants. They promoted the development and acceptance of conventions by countries against sea piracy and it was outlawed.
In contrast, modern rules that had been developed to prevent invasion of the economy by financial raiders were set aside. The Anglo-American alliance, represented from 1976 by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, gradually removed safeguards that held back financial raiders. Thirty years onwards several large banks have become mistrustful because of unprecedented fraud in financial markets.
In Germany today, chancellor Angela Merkel stands in the forefront of the EU movement for bringing back rules so that trade between countries can flow without unusual price hikes. In addition, survival in many a nation will require rationing and state planned distribution for efficient use of basic goods such as food.
The Chicago school of monetarists - which substantiated invasions by financial raiders - was not able to persuade China to put aside its central planning system. Therefore, this large developing country will cope better with the world economic recession.
Ex-Warsaw pact countries including Czechia, Poland and Russia use budgetary systems today that can be reinforced by activating their own planning resources. Specialists in planning in the Germany's east can also share the experience, which helped raise the economy from 1945 after destruction in the war.
On the other hand, today's trade flows will be hurt by nations that rely solely on high level financial planning. The monetary crisis of 1997, which hurt Japan, South Korea and other US allies in Asia, brought up the issue of financial terrorism. At what seems like the tail end of a string of events, the names of financial organisations prominent in the Western hemisphere, receive mention in connection with the loss of immense resources.
Full Report
Every writer on economic themes must at some moment quote Adam Smith. So did the Chicago monetarists when during the last 30 years their plans advised removing safeguards and allowing financial raiders in. Citing reforms for a free flow of capital, they let people choke on rogue instruments that included the shares, bonds or securities of WorldCom, Enron and AIG.
“Economics” was known in statecraft. Yet, the 18th century granted Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, an eminence surpassing all others. Two millennia earlier Aristotle, serving as tutor to Alexander the Great, had been using the term ‘Oikonomika’ (dictionaries derive ‘economics’ from the Greeks.) Further east, advisor Kautila, serving Indian royalty, evoked several volumes entitled ‘Artashasthra’ (‘Worth Treatise’.)
It is in year 1757 that we track down the facts that contributed to the eminence that Adam Smith obtained. That year saw Benjamin Franklin, a prominent scientist and statesman, asked to account for the wealth of the American colonies across the Atlantic. Here are words recorded when Benjamin Franklin was called to speak before the British Parliament on the wealth of the colonies:
“That is simple. In the colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one.”
Franklin’s words regarding currency in Parliament alarmed private financiers.
The financiers union, the Bank of England had been incorporated on July 27, 1694, as a joint-stock association with a capital of £1.2 million. The company received the right to issue notes and a monopoly on corporate banking in England ? in return for an immediate loan to the king of the entire treasure. They had calculated that such treasure would never be returned whereas interest from the king’s treasury would keep accumulating in their hands in perpetuity. Through this action (1) the king would become an accessory of their company and (2) in their receiving authority to print and issue banknotes as counterpart to the treasure ? their power would advance in the land by leaps and bounds.
After Franklin’s words on an economic theme, the financiers sped into counter-attacking the American colonies. They had to force the colonies to give up the idea of issuing their debt-free currency, a competing product. In consequence their Bank of England won over Parliament and King George III signed the Currency Act of 1764 to decree that the colonies stop printing their own money. Staging financial terrorism, the bankers also saw to the dispatch of shiploads of counterfeit Colonial Scrip to contribute to economic depression in the colonies.
Benjamin Franklin pioneers study of electricity of lightning storm [picture]
Benjamin Franklin recorded, “In one year, the conditions were so reversed that the era of prosperity ended, and a depression set in, to such an extent that the streets of the Colonies were filled with unemployed.”
This led the colonies into warfare with Britain and two decades later the rebels decided on the unilateral declaration of independence on 4th July 1776.
The government of George III however continued warring with the colonists on money floated by the same financial city of London. The borrowed money went even into hiring men in Germany to serve as British soldiers. Because, the volume of borrowing grew large, some in the financial city reasoned that added taxation of people in mainland Britain to pay interest would bring rebellion into the mainland against both king and financiers. The stakes became too high for the financiers.
History begins in Glasgow
In consequence, the help of people like Glasgow professor Adam Smith was sought. Besides staving off rebellion at home, the other task was to condemn supporters everywhere of Benjamin Franklin’s debt-free currency.
Smith came up with a book in 1776. The book’s title, “The Wealth of Nations” inadvertently gives away the over-trumping Smith intended in the controversy that Benjamin Franklin had caused when he was asked about “the wealth of the colonies.”
Smith’s work was prepared after studying authors in Britain and abroad. It took up many themes but most importantly for posterity, Smith rearranged Bernard Mandeville’s “Fable of the Bees.” This story had become famous in the 1724 edition of Mandeville’s book where he drew an example from the bee collecting nectar to suggest that “Private vices bring public benefit.” Sanitising and sanctifying Mandeville’s theme, Smith converted it into a claim on the Invisible Hand:
He announced that every individual in pursuing his or her own good is led, as if by an invisible hand, to achieve the best good for all. Therefore any interference with free competition by government is almost certain to bring bad effects.
Adam Smith who proclaimed the Invisible Hand [picture]
Adam Smith’s sanctification of Mandeville’s ‘private vice’ theory performed three functions at the altar of London’s financial city:
(1) He soothed king and government – and helped towards a truce with the rebels;
(2) Smith left the financiers to fight another day (he, for instance, keeps from exposing the financiers’ motives that had catalysed the loss of the American colonies.) The financiers could rejuvenate by utilising other markets (for instance, they switched Britain’s “free trade” from cotton imports from America to imports from Egypt);
(3) Using the concept “Invisible Hand” Smith was creating a hyper-real association with the benevolent hand of the Almighty. He had contrived meaning for a Christian population, for comparison in this context, not a Buddhist population.
Economics moves through Petrograd to the Chicago Boys
Smith surmised that to expose the hand of finance capital, to let it be seen as a plutocracy or oligarchy, would at the time, court rebellion in the British mainland.
On the other hand, despite job losses everywhere in the world today, we don’t see rebellion on the boards. Does that mean sea change arose?
We must in part attribute this to the well-financed parade of Ayn Rand, the ideologue behind the monetarists and long term associate of guru Milton Friedman (and also of the USFed’s Alan Greenspan.)
She had arrived in the USA in 1926 from Bolshevik-era Petrograd where the avid viewer of silent movies had found promise in studying Social Pedagogy at university in Russia. Her environment was such that in place of the concerns of Adam Smith, she had immersed herself in nihilists who served up “Nothing Matters” to soothe those professionals who dissented under the Tsar. Reflections on nihilism are available in publications by Turgenev and other contemporaries.
What is nihilism?
“However, if I may say so,” Nicholas Petrovich interjected, “you deny everything or, to put it more precisely, you are destroying everything…. But it’s essential to construct as well.” To which Bazarov the Nihilist replied: “That is not our affair…. We must make a clean sweep first.”
Ivan Turgenev in 1862 novel ‘Fathers and Sons’
The Anglo-American heritage and background to the ‘Invisible Hand’ axiom was left somewhere in the attic as Ayn Rand went on to preach her doctrine of “God is I” (for no one else matters.)
If we were to try to give voice to her in relation to Adam Smith, her doctrine declares that the “Invisible Hand is I”. Her doctrine evokes self-adulation and self-promotion in the general population when by calculation, the first among equals, giant financial groups such as Citibank, J P Morgan or Lehman Brothers, gain the lion’s share. It is no level playing field. Sensing relaxed rules, fly-by-nights afflicted vulnerable populations world-wide. In Sri Lanka, a TV English teacher used his popularity with audiences to set up a finance company and then vanished into the night with his depositors’ savings.
The scriptwriter for these events, Ayn Rand, was a first-generation American. Such was the case for the parents of Milton Friedman and his frontline Chicago Boys (Chicago University arose through the finance/oil Rockefellers endowment.) In brief, we had aliens catapulted into Anglo-American heritage with its historical bases in the Mayflower Compact and the Magna Carta - and someone took aliens seriously. This gave rogue traders impetus because it unhinged the balance in civics and ethics that Adam Smith had intended.
Petrograd scriptwriter of statecraft Ayn Rand
Rand wrote opaque prose but her work led the parade because other campaigners allied with big money sponsored media reviews and successfully promoted Ayn Rand’s work in paperback edition for sale to students and academe on campus.
Over the years her marketers fused her self-adulation axiom with “self respect.” In a final phase, when Great Communicator Ronald Reagan arrived in the Presidency, Ayn Rand’s axiom merged with the story “Customer is King” (i.e. the familiar advertising claim.) It finally went out for use in media under headings such as, “Free to Choose.”
That crept into ethics and morality as [I am] “Free to Choose” [and the devil take my neighbour.] Out at No: 10, Downing Street, philosopher in residence Alan Walters, so mesmerised PM Margaret Thatcher that she exalted, “There’s no such thing as society; there are only individuals and families.”
Rand’s nihilist fable had annulled society and provided Reagan-allied PM Thatcher with steely self-righteousness to sell out her “null” constituency if she so desired (that is, after collecting the deposit of people’s votes at the elections.) The worth of her constituency could now unflinchingly become the influence that the PM’s office gives to the personas of Mr. Dennis and Mrs Margaret Thatcher. Still, that was only the thin edge of the wedge. The Ayn Rand axiom on neglecting community led on to encourage negligence on the part of countless politicians, state officials and market regulators. That gave the first among equals, the financiers, their 30-year tickets to run.
Safeguards against fraud
Joseph Stiglitz, a 2001 Nobel prizewinner, comments in part on the results of the negligence, “The pursuit of self-interest by Enron and WorldCom did not lead to societal well-being; and the pursuit of self-interest by those in the financial industry has brought our economy to the brink of the abyss.”
Financial fraud was a known phenomenon. Anglo-American statesmen had at home therefore long balanced Adam Smith by installing filters to block wrongdoers. The institutions that statesmen created to keep away the pursuit of dangerous self-interest include Fair Trading bodies and Securities Commissions. Later, shortsightedness generated by the monetarists did away with these filters against the creation of toxic waste.
Yet, even beyond that Friedman, during a descent from his corresponding Planet Me, was to confess that he had overlooked the rule of law as a fundamental requirement in transition to a market economy. Make a clean nihilist sweep first; ask questions about civil requirements later. J K Galbraith comments about his contemporary, “Milton’s problem is that his theories have been tried.”
Today, reports on toxic waste fill the same network media that promoted the Chicago Boys after Great Communicator Ronald Reagan went into occupation of the Oval Office.
Still, there’s more. Petrograd’s Ayn Rand had chosen to outbid revolutionary parties by offering a more radical human freedom. Using that legend, the Chicago Boys mired potential revolutionaries, peaceful or otherwise, in the ever-changing consumer choices that media advertising generates ? Windows Me, My Yahoo, i-Mac, i-Pod ? a wave of products catering for “me” (and not “you”!)
President Kennedy once said, “Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible will make violent revolutions inevitable.” If a peaceful return to a normally functioning economy is impaired, then today’s consumers will seek salvation otherwise. If high-end financial planning does not finally pay off ? to speak of the future hypothetically ? it is China’s central planning system that may save souls who in fishing trawlers and yachts, cast off from the US Pacific rim for China.
In Russia, on 6th April.2009 Vladimir Putin decided to place before the modern Duma for debate for the first time, the state budget. Considering his country’s available know-how, this step can prepare the ground for a salvation that includes activating the personnel of central planning administration GOSPLAN. It was set aside with subversive intentions by the USAID team gathered by Lawrence Summers. He was previously on the reform team that bequeathed Lithuania the highest suicide rate in Europe. Wall Street has seated a veteran guide of financial buccaneering as head of President Obama’s White House Economic Council.
Can we say “Yes, Wall Street financial planners will eliminate toxic waste creation soon?” Or perhaps an IMF super currency may help nations trade internationally if gold is stockpiled by bullion merchants as blueprinted by the 1930s Great Depression?
Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is now in the forefront of the EU movement to bring back rules so that the trade of nations can again flow undisturbed. Yet, for many a nation survival will require careful rationing, supported by economic planning, to utilise food and other resources that are becoming scarce and expensive.
Coping with the recession will be easier in China. The Chicago school monetarists, who canvassed in favour of invasion by raiders, could not talk this large developing country into setting aside its planning system.
Ex-Warsaw pact countries including Czechia, Poland and Russia use budgetary systems today that can be reinforced by activating their own planning resources. Specialists in planning in the Germany's east can also share the experience, which helped raise the economy from 1945 after destruction in the war.
On the other hand, today's trade flows will be hurt by nations that rely solely on high level financial planning. The monetary crisis of 1997, which hurt Japan, South Korea and other US allies in Asia, brought up the issue of financial terrorism. At what seems like the tail end of a string of events, the names of financial organisations prominent in the Western hemisphere, receive mention in connection with the loss of immense resources.
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